Have a couple of servers I'd like to setup as Hyper-V Servers, with a couple of Windows 2008 Standard VMs. On the host, we have a few hardware devices we'd like to be accessible to the guest; I'm not sure if these are supported via a raw "pass-thru" on Hyper-V (which I don't have a lot of experience with) if the same drivers are installed on the guest.

Hardware in question is a Brooktrout fax card, a SCSI adapter for the tape drive, and a 9-pin serial connected to one of the core firewalls for management.

2 Answers
2

Serial Port: Yes, but you have to set up the COM as a Named Pipe on the host machine, so I don't know how this will affect your software.

Tape drives have been discussed here and the answer is an emphatical "no". You best bet is to install the tape drive into normal server (if your host machine is the bare-metal Hyper-V this won't work, it has to be the normal Windows install, and then have the Hyper-V role added) and expose it via iSCSI. There's plenty of software around that can do this. Starwind is one of them.

As for the fax card, I haven't seen any sort of PCI pass-through in Hyper-V. VMWare ESXi is way ahead of Microsoft Hyper-V on this front, however to use PCI Passthrough in VMWare you need to have fully supported hardware which may pose an issue if you've already purchased the servers, and there's no way to know for sure that your software will work the way you expect without trying it.